The dregs of January!

That line from a song by Gordon Lightfoot rattled around inside my brain at 3:30 AM on a brisk early morning in late January, 2018. I realized that I was so not living la vida loca and that the cold dregs of January were turning me every so slightly towards a more nihilistic approach to life and living.

That said, I still needed to contemplate all things basic, not the least of which was eating a decent breakfast. And even as that blessed event was still some hours away, I spent no little amount of time in bed planning such culinary and mundanely related matters... tic tock tic tock....

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At the 6AM hour I 'bounded' out of bed, in a manner only other old men could ever understand! It was 28 degrees outside, the sky was clear (as best I could make out) and the winds were nonexistent. Not a day to want to venture out, but rather one to stay in the kitchen, perhaps, and whittle away at what had been a promising diet. On this morning, I elected to throw together a cheese omelet and some biscuits covered in brown gravy. (My only effort towards eating healthy resided in a glass of low sodium tomato juice). The rest of it was pure and very enjoyable crap. 

Breakfast came and went all too quickly. Sort of like a dream that you forget all to quickly. I washed my dishes and put them away while contemplating all the chores that needed to be done, even while also scheming madly on how I could avoid doing them.  One of those chores involved taking out the trash. A task that required me to walk about a half a block to a dumpster... in the cold. I decided the trash was just fine where it was...

Walking over to the living room, I sank down into my easy chair, turned on the TV and then turned it off and took a nap. Heck, lunch was just a few hours away...

What's with the potatoes, bread and gravy!

What started out as an impulse buy at a local grocery store has quickly bloomed into an ongoing catastrophe as what had been a successful diet effort had turned way south!

I bought a single packet of brown gravy after it caught my eye in the herb isle of my local grocery store. I'd been primed for this as I'd also purchased some biscuits earlier in the the day. A quick nutritional look informed me that this was not a really bad idea. I mean 70 calories was no biggie. And for the first couple of breakfast encounters, I did faithfully adhere to just one biscuit and 6 grams of gravy... That was a few days ago...

On what was otherwise a really nice weekend morning, I arose a tad hung over after having gone out on the town the evening before. (Actually it was more like a night of utter debauchery which also involved some power drinking... but, I digress).

So, there I was in the kitchen that morning, in my robe with my fly away hair making breakfast. I made up a nice omelet as had been planned, but then I began to add some potatoes and shredded bread – I thought 'Why Not?', at the time. Yes, I think that was definitely the moment that things began to unravel for me...

Later that same day, it came to me that I would really enjoy ordering a Big Mac and fries from the McDonald's that stood not three miles from my door. (In the back of my mind I could hear the 'diet meter' clicking away. Truthfully, the food was all it could be and more)!

Way too late into the diet game, I realized that once you fill up a previously shrunk down stomach, it more than willingly expands. And with that expansion come intensified hunger pains. Swell.

So it was, as the evening fell, I found myself seated in front of a large plate of Penne pasta as viewed from over a rather large tummy......